This concert marked the start of the 65th birthday celebrations for the English Chamber Orchestra. As you might expect, the bulk of the works performed were in some respect English, but none conventionally so. We began with Elgar’s Chanson de Matin, easy to write off as a piece of Edwardian salon music; but here in Nimrod Borenstein’s lithe arrangement for strings alone, it comes over as a charming intermezzo summoning up the well-upholstered era of The Forsyte Saga rather better than Elgar’s own larger orchestral version. Then followed a performance of the same composer’s Serenade for Strings, a notably brisk and unsentimental reading, uninhibited by the famous Barbirolli recording, and not tempted to give this often wispy and wistful work the same weight as the later Introduction and Allegro.
Elgar always took the view that composers should generally set lower-order texts on the grounds that it is very hard to add value to the finest poetry that already posssesses its own complex internal ‘music.’ This is clearly not a view shared by Nimrod Borenstein, whose Shakespeare Songs, a sequence of five sonnets for soprano and orchestra, formed the final work in the first half.
The settings combine much anthologised Shakespeare sonnets (18, 138 and 116) with more obscure ones (27,29), thus creating both familiarity and a sense of discovery for the audience. The sonnets have been thoughtfully arranged to construct a narrative that charts the throes of love. Listening to the cycle feels like a progress through a relationship, moving from romantic rapture and passionate admiration of beauty in sonnet 18, through a growing sense of distrust and compromise in sonnet 138. However this is overcome and love is triumphantly affirmed in 116. Absence causes yearning in 27; finally, a sense of appreciation and divine grace is established in 29 as love is deemed the only real source of riches and fulfilment.
The music is composed so as to powerfully transmute the movements and structure of the sonnet form into a musical language. For instance, the transitions in the verse, whether from octave to sestet or elsewhere, are effectively acknowledged by sudden shifts in the mood of the music. The vocal line is projected in an arioso style with some element of repetition, particularly half-lines of special significance. Sarah Fox points the text admirably, and finds a sustained lyricism in the writing, even at tricky high levels in the register. The orchestral textures echo the sense of the text (for example, pizzicato motifs to represent the ticking passage of time), but at points also come into separate eloquent focus. This is especially so in the final and most elaborate setting, where the full orchestra assembles to recall the wealth of riches remembered love brings. All in all, this was a distinguished debut for these settings which deserve further dissemination. Borenstein achieves his goal of creating a showcase for Shakespeare that adds nuance and inflection to the distinguished original.
The second half of the concert introduced a work that might as as well have been a premiere too – Novelleten by Coleridge-Taylor. Like the Elgar in the first half, this music from 1902 hovers between the salon and symphony hall: certainly more than sweet pleasantries, but not fully developed either. It is yet another work from the extensive oeuvre of this composer that deserves to be better known. The orchestration is deft and the melodies spacious and memorable, as you would expect from the composer of Hiawatha. Music of effortless facility, but never facile. It received a delicate and tasteful performance from the ECO strings – any TV or film producers in the audience should take note there is plenty of material here worthy of a broader audience outside the concert hall.
With real Spring sunshine outside, as if on cue, we ended the afternoon with a remarkably fine performance of Vaughan William’s A Lark Ascending. Soloist John Mills really did sound like a lark in the cornfields, varying the dynamics of his spiralling, quasi-improvisatory lines just as the bird itself varies the volume of its effervescent, endless flow. Mills is also the leader of the ECO, and their give-and-take and mutual understanding added real value at key points, such as the final, immaculately embedded, ensemble chord, offering the perfect platform for the soloist’s cadenza, a thin filament of violin sound ascending to its almost imperceptible vanishing point.
This repertory and this size of chamber orchestra are ideally suited to the size and acoustic of the Cadogan Hall, which itself helped make this such a satisfactory afternoon of music making; all rounded off with a cheeky little encore, again of Borenstein’s devising.
[The section of this review devoted to Shakespeare Songs was written jointly with PTS colleague, Olivia Hurton]
English Chamber Orchestra
Conductor: Nimrod Borenstein
Soloists: Sarah Fox and John Mills
9th March 2025
2 hrs with interval
Photo Credit: Colin Sheen